Influence and Inheritance: New Translations from Spanish Master Giralt Torrente

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For writers, literary inheritance is inexorable. Many suppress, some overcome, and a great deal are burdened by what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of influence.” The writers who transcend their inheritance might allude to their precursors, tip their cap, and maybe even insert a line or two from the master into their work as a sign of respect.

But contemporary Spanish authors have taken a different approach. Refusing to settle for polite allusion, they instead dig up the masters and plop them into their narratives. Take Carlos Rojas’sThe Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell, where the Garcia Lorca sits in hell watching his life acted out on stage. In The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño’s itinerant characters embark on a quest for their literary gods. Enrique Vila-Matas’s novels pathologize literary influence; characters succumb to literary diseases (Montano’s Malady) and enter Hemingway lookalike contests.

So it’s no surprise that Spain would produce Marcos Giralt Torrente, a writer fixated on influence and inheritance. Giralt Torrente is already well-respected in Spain, where he has won the Herralde Novel Prize and the Spanish National Book Award, but his name will be fairly new for most English readers. In the past year alone three of his books—the story collection, The End of Love, a novel, Paris, and his memoir, Father and Son: A Lifetime—have been published as English translations. Giralt Torrente is the son of painter Juan Giralt and the maternal grandson of esteemed Spanish novelist, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. He would seem, therefore, the perfect candidate to carry the torch of his contemporaries. And yet, Giralt Torrente is less concerned with literary influence than he is with familial influence, the inheritance that haunts the person regardless of whether the author emerges.

2.Of the three books recently published, Giralt Torrente’s first novel, Paris, serves as the best introduction. Here he begins to develop the themes of memory, fidelity, deceit, and family that recur throughout his work. It is a dense, deeply reflective novel, narrated by a middle-aged man trying to understand his parents’ inexplicable marriage. The narrator is mesmerized and obsessed with his mother, a controlling, strong-willed woman whose selective disclosures have shaped what the narrator remembers from his childhood: “I have no way of finding out if she is also the reason I don’t know certain other things, things she deliberately kept from me. When our knowledge of a subject depends on the words of others, we can never be sure if they’ve told us everything or only a part.”

His memories, so thoroughly contaminated by her, cannot be trusted. Yet memory remains “a great temptation.” Tempting and addictive. A burden for those who seek comfort, for to remember is to struggle, to disentangle received narratives, reorder them, in a fruitless attempt to uncover the truth.

Not big T truth—though that’s all over Paris—but the basic truth, what happened and why. And what’s marvelous about Paris is that, despite its relative lack of action, the novel holds our attention, as we, too, read to uncover what happened. This is partly due to Giralt Torrente’s careful plotting, and partly due to a swaddling, syntactical empathy.

We want the narrator to get what he wants. Giralt Torrente doesn’t achieve this by making his character likeable, or vulnerable. Empathy, here, is achieved through the syntax. Giralt Torrente is a masterful sentence writer. He learned to write on a diet of Henry James, Faulkner, Proust, and Thomas Bernhard. Though his sentences, packed with dependent clauses and parenthetical flights, rarely reach the multi-page length of a Faulkner or Bernhard sentence, they beautifully and patiently trace the nuanced digressions of his characters’ minds. Here is a passage from Paris:

When we think about the past, it’s hard to resist both dividing it up into blocks in accordance with the pattern of events that have made the most impression on us and attributing powers to it that it does not have, allowing ourselves to believe that the arrival of a particular date had the ability to work some radical transformation on us. Until the death of my father, we say, I was like this or like that, when we should really say that on such and such a date, something that had already existed inside us began to make itself manifest or visible.

To borrow from William Gass, these sentences “contrive (through order, meaning, sound, and rhythm) a moving unity of fact and feeling.” As we read we think with the narrator thinking through the idea. The statement is felt rather than proven. And the use of the first person plural conflates narrator and readers. But there is a difference between Giralt Torrente’s use of the first person plural, and Javier Marias’s, who uses this technique quite often. In Marias “we” is broad and inclusive, sweeping through Madrid and Oxford, while in Giralt Torrente the “we” is restrictive, limited to his characters and his readers. We feel caught in the narrator’s mind, hearing it obsessively reassess, which is perhaps most reminiscent of Bernhard, where each sentence seals off the world like Montresor stacking the bricks in our tomb.

This insularity is heightened by Giralt Torrente’s reliance on first person in all three recent books. He describes his narrators as “witnesses, in general cultivated and very reflective, for whom doubting their perceptions, questioning them and clarifying them, is their way of being in the world.” Father and Son: A Lifetime indicates that is also how Giralt Torrente exists in the world. The memoir, written shortly after Giralt Torrente’s father died from cancer, meticulously explores their strained relationship in an attempt to “understand what [they] lost; where [they] got stuck.” Comprised of many short fragments, the memoir weaves together a loose chronology of their lives—the galleries they visited, the absences, the arguments, the conversations and women they shared—with lyrical, paratactic reflections: “We got stuck because his consummate solipsism made him accept the unspoken and I demanded action. . . . we both thought we deserved more than we had. . . . we got stuck because I made him the creditor of a debt that I tried to call in when it had already expired.”

Inheritance, for Giralt Torrente, is not strictly filial, but existential. The relationship between father and son in Father and Son, lets him explore personhood more broadly. The search for where they got stuck is inseparable from the search for identity. Was stubbornness to blame? Competiveness? And if they share those traits shouldn’t the son be let off the hook? How relieving it is to trace our most toxic traits to our parents. Inheritance is expiation—but it’s also original sin. Giralt Torrente’s work suggests character is inherent and untraceable. Discovering the seed of ourselves is as easy as pinching hydrogen atoms out of a river.

Perhaps this is why we often concede to our selfhood. As Giralt Torrente writes in Paris, our character “depends not on the appearance or disappearance of new characteristics but rather on the way in which certain already-existing characteristics win out over others.” To refuse to accept yourself is to grasp with irritable, buttery fingers. So we pivot to the question of when. Not when we became who we are—the narrator in Paris rightly debunks that search—but the discernible when: the choice that made everything different, the instant we acted a certain way and thus cemented the future. These are the moments that plague conspiracy theorists, jilted lovers, and armchair quarterbacks.

In The End of Love, Giralt Torrente’s story collection, many characters obsess over such moments. The speaker in “We Were Surrounded by Palm Trees,” reflecting on the final days of his relationship, says, “one of memory’s most powerful tendencies is to identify those moments when it would still have been possible to change the course of events.” He has been seduced by this moment. Memory loves to convince us we’re free, in control. It fills our heads with revisions, the house we might’ve owned, lovers we could’ve loved, jobs that would’ve fully inspired us, if only we’d kept playing piano or told Chris how he felt. But choice, for Giralt Torrente, is an illusion. Had the narrator in acted differently, he may have lengthened his relationship, but he would not have saved it.

This sentiment is powerfully expressed in the collection’s second story, “Captives.” It follows the narrator’s attractive older cousin, Alicia, and her husband, Guillermo. They were a young and beautiful couple, wealthy and itinerant, traveling to distract themselves from their loveless marriage. Alicia sends the narrator postcards and letters, but eventually their marital woes become exasperating. “I lost patience with [Alicia’s] lack of decisiveness. I thought that, as she seemed destined to leave Guillermo, any delay was stupid. Clearly, I underestimated her.” The relationship persists. And with Guillermo dying, the narrator visits the couple. They live on the same estate, in two separate houses, neither able to leave the other. On his death bed, Guillermo explains:

We believe we have an impregnable interior, a place where we are defended, where we can steel ourselves, but then it turns out that even we can’t get in. Even the most elemental things, our dreams, elude our will. How different everything would have been if my desire had obeyed me. Deep down, we have been equals, even in that. In her own way, Alicia and I have been captives of the same incapacity. [italics Giralt Torrente’s]

The will, here, exists, but it is in no way free. It is free the way dogs at the kennel are free to bark as loud as they like. To fully understand one’s desires is to see the discord between what is desired and what is obtained. In Father and Son, this is expressed in extended passages of longing—“I liked it when he considered me an equal . . . I liked to match his dilettantish hedonism . . . I liked to invade his territory . . . I wanted to learn, to be like him, and I imitated him”—which are repeatedly undercut: “But I hardly ever succeeded. I lacked so much of the knowledge I know he possessed. We squandered so many opportunities.” This is not simply weltschmerz. It is a further expression of Giralt Torrente’s somewhat Aristotelian conception of personhood: people do not change, they merely reach their inherent potential.

Giralt Torrente is, in other words, a fatalist resistant to fatalism. He isn’t trying to teach his characters lessons. He doesn’t think they are wrong for trying to pinpoint the moments when life changes, when personalities shift, but the ordeal is never successful. Giralt Torrente empathizes with the futile attempt to fully understand who we are. In Father and Son, death reminds him that “everything comes to an end, that there’s no redemption, that what wasn’t done can no longer be done.” Such a bleak realization, learned in life but expressed in the memoir, suggests that Giralt Torrente, knowing there is no redemption, still writes the memoir that strives to redeem its subjects.

There is nothing sensational, no gimmicks or zany protagonists, in Giralt Torrente’s fiction. The influence of Henry James is apparent. Giralt Torrente writing feels classically devoted to storytelling. His books are haunting, complex, and engrossing, peopled with well-developed, flawed characters that are obsessive and voluble, yet Giralt Torrente, for all the freedom he gives them to speak, never cedes control of his stories. One pleasure of reading his work is unlocking their structures, seeing time subtly manipulated, seeing what the characters do not, and may never, understand. His books are charged and evocative, loaded with precise, intelligent sentences that create worlds that are easy to enter and impossible to escape.

Alex McElroy
's work appears or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Diagram, Tin House, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, ProQuest, and more work can be found here. He currently lives in Arizona, where he serves as the International Editor for Hayden's Ferry Review.

Abbott isn't merely a poster girl for this increasingly progressive atmosphere surrounding "genre." Her novels are distinguished by rhythmic prose, historical settings , and a candor about the way people live.

Already, the mind reels. If Abe's body of work has room for an image like that, where exactly are its boundaries? If you're unfamiliar with the man's books, I'd forgive you for imagining the heaving epics of an undisciplined maximalist, novels where ridiculousness piles upon grotesquerie until both text and reader collapse.

Last summer, right before my grandfather died, my mother and her boyfriend, Jim, rode their bikes to his house. My grandparents live four miles away from my mom, and it’s a straight shot down a semi-wooded New Jersey street where cars can only go 35 miles per hour but usually go 50. Jim’s in okay shape, for a 50-something-year-old man, but my mom is one of those people who has time in the morning—who wakes up at 6 a.m., doesn’t snooze, runs five miles, eats breakfast, reads the news, and then gets ready for work. Jim, like the rest of us, tends to lag a bit behind. That day, he professed exhaustion about the return trip and declared that my grandmother should give them a ride back in her car. She consented.
“One-Way Jim,” my grandfather said to him, according to the story that’s been passed on to my brother, my cousins, my uncles, and me. “I’m calling you that from now on.”
He wasn’t kidding.
My grandpa—“Pop,” as we called him—was born in the Ironbound, in Newark, the only son of an Italian immigrant. He was a person of contradictions. I never saw him overeat, but he weighed more than 300 pounds. I never witnessed him get violent, but he had a safe filled with dozens of automatic weapons. I never came across him not wearing leather sandals, all black, and a red bandana over his forehead, but he had closets stuffed with dress shoes and gaudy suits. And I never caught him reading a book. But he reveled in words, and he had a propensity for nicknames.
Being nicknamed by Pop was like being knighted by the king. There was Joe Bugs, an exterminator and small-town mayor, whose one daughter married my uncle. There was Ernie the Attorney, who grew up with Pop and became the family lawyer. There was Satellite Bob, who installed and fixed his televisions for decades. There was Video Bob, too (before my time), and there was Ralphie Boy (a hefty man, so large and so old, it’s nearly impossible to imagine him as a child). There were so many more I wish I could remember.
There was a subtle irony to Pop’s reliance on the obvious, though only if you were “in” on the joke. Only few were. I don’t doubt, for instance, that the “Bugs” of “Joe Bugs” works in two ways: one as a nod to his profession, and the other at his uncanny ability to keep running his mouth, even when you don’t want him to. One-Way Jim, the same way: he was both incapable of completing a round-trip on his bicycle, and he is a relatively simple man (he eats the same things every day, he only gets The Star-Ledger on Sundays, he goes to bed—punctually—at 8 p.m. each night). Ernie the Attorney, beyond the rhyme and the reference to his job: he was Pop’s counsel, the only adult I can really recall giving him advice he’d actually accept. Satellite Bob: he repairs televisions (he became known in Pop’s town for installing the largest satellite around), and he’s seemingly everywhere, a simple phone call away, as if he’s floating in the night sky and can descend somewhere in a second’s notice. (He once appeared at Pop’s beach house, two hours from where he resided, in a matter of 30 minutes with no explanation.)
I’ve been thinking about Pop—and nicknames—because I’ve been thinking much about Donald Trump’s extremely short-lived communications director, Anthony Scaramucci—or to his friends, his buddies on Wall Street, the “Mooch.” After his (apparently not uncommon) on-the-record, profanity-laced rant to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, I joked that Scaramucci would be the worst thing for Italian Americans since The Jersey Shore. Thankfully, he lasted 10 days and never officially started his role. (Days before his ousting, Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone, “I already miss Anthony Scaramucci.”) But still, in the span of basically a week, we had an entire USA Today article dedicated to the Mooch blowing a kiss at the end of a press briefing, Mario Cantoneimpersonating him on Comedy Central’s The President Show, and this New York Times headline—“You Talkin’ to Me? Trump’s White House Gets Some New York Attitude.” Seattle’s The Stranger even had a quiz that asked you to identify if Scaramucci said a quote or Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) from Goodfellas. This, of course, is the type of nuanced reaction we’ve come to expect: caricaturing a caricature, parodying a parody.
No one brought up, that is, the moment Martin Scorsese, in his signature tracking shot, meanders the camera through a restaurant as Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) introduces all the characters in a voiceover: Fat Andy. Frankie the Wop. Freddie No Nose. Pete the Killer. Nicky Eyes. Jimmy Two Times. Hill offers little explanation for these Mafia monikers, beyond the occasional terse clarification. Jimmy Two Times, for example, “got [his] nickname because he said everything twice.” It’s hard, though, not to consider a less literal interpretation, one from Pop’s practiced tradition: that Jimmy could have been a deceiver, too, maybe an unfaithful lover. The point is, however, that I don’t know. I know as much about Jimmy Two Times’s sexual encounters as you do about Joe Bugs and his blabbering.
That Goodfellas scene is a flash, a 45-second onslaught of connections and relationships, and these mobsters vanish back into a place of which we’re unfamiliar. We’re uncertain. This happens, too, on The Sopranos. We don’t see Paulie Walnuts hijack a truck he thinks holds television sets but really just contains a bunch of walnuts. We don’t see Big Pussy start out as a cat burglar. (“Pussy,” naturally, could also be a double entendre.) We’re left to wonder, always on the outside no matter how close we believe we get. The reason the nicknames on The Jersey Shore are so laughable is because they’re so utterly devoid of meaning. They’re not ambiguous. The nicknames, like the fictional space they exist in that’s purported to be “reality,” seem fake. Snooki, JWoww, Mike the Situation: these titles elicit no lore, no mystery, no legend. So nobody cares. We recognize they’re self-anointed. We move on.
But now we arrive at the Mooch, the brief reality-television star and the second-most powerful man in America for almost a fortnight. His nickname lends itself to analysis: it’s a truncated version of his last name, sure, but it’s also a likely summation of his personality and business strategy. The “Mooch” sounds like something you should be screaming from the sidelines as he reaches the 50-yard line. He’s a mooch. He takes things, enriching himself off others. Here, in Slate’s Felix Salmon’s words:
The Mooch, it’s important to understand, comes as close as humanly possible to being a man without a soul. His entire career has been based on finding people who are richer, more powerful, or otherwise more successful than himself and trying to be more like them.
It’s his “affectionate nickname on Wall Street,” according to William D. Cohan’sop-ed in The New York Times. In other words, it’s a term of endearment, a word that can only be fully understood by those closest to him. I do not know the Mooch, and barring his wealthy pals and a few journalists he treats as therapists, nor do most Americans. The name was nothing more than a glimpse into a world that’s not our own, a camera sliding through a crowded bar, an old man I loved and you didn’t, sitting in a chair and convincing an exterminator to laugh at how annoying he is.
So long, Mooch. We hardly knew ye.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Memoir at its very best is the start of a conversation. It makes its interest in readers explicit, offering not just a series of life events, but a deliberate suggestion of what it is to be a human being – to experience confusion, despair, hope, joy, and all that happens in between.

hearing the echo of writers talking of their difficulties and triumphs with writing can provide the consolation and inspiration it takes to toil on, such as knowing that Orhan Pamuk “work[s] like a clerk” or that even Paul Auster feels stupid sometimes.

I want my students to see reading as something combative, vulgar, assertive—a constant back-and-forth between reading and rereading, moments of stepping outside the text then coming back and battering at it with questions. Something better done in a flak jacket than pajamas.